


Only In Fairytales

by lostnoise



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - World War II, Eventual Sex, Gen, M/M, Slow Build, Work In Progress, other tags to come?, they're all jewish
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-13
Updated: 2013-02-09
Packaged: 2017-11-25 09:49:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/637623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostnoise/pseuds/lostnoise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘War’ is whispered on the wind by the time Stiles is eleven, and the next year, Germany invades Poland. He is twelve years old and far too young to know the fear of death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is based more-than-slightly on the book ‘Number the Stars,’ which has stuck with me since I first read it, and also somewhat based a couple of other World War II books that I’ve read but can’t recall the names of. I also totally fudged some of the things to suit the universe I created (like using a SCANT amount of modern English slang) so please don’t come after me for historical accuracy; I’ve done the best I can. Also a warning for possibly shitty/out-of-character characterization? I tried. The title is based on a quote from 'Number the Stars' and this entire story was born out of [this](http://teenwolfkink.livejournal.com/6131.html?thread=4570611#t4570611) kinkmeme prompt, but definitely does not meet the "ghetto/concentration camp" aspect that was asked for.

Stiles meets Derek for the first time before the whispers of tyrants and wars infiltrate their peaceful lives in Copenhagen.

 

Stiles is eight years old, refuses to go by his given name, and he’s walking down the street with his hand in his mom’s; she’s got the same eyes as he does, and the same dark hair, and she’s the light of his life. She’s the only one who can call him by his given name. He’s unashamed to be a mama’s boy, especially since all the other Jewish boys in school love their moms like he loves his, too. His mom gets distracted in front of the bakery while Stiles, holding on while his mom chats with another woman outside, fidgets with his usual unending energy. The cold bites at the tip of his little nose; it’s almost time for Hanukkah. Stiles presses his face to the glass, free hand splayed and sweaty on the cool glass, to look in at the treats - pieces of halvah sprinkled with powdered sugar or with a chocolate-nut sauce on top, rugelach drizzled with chocolate, kugel with what looked like raisins. There are loaves of bread, sweet cakes with cocoa powder, frosted cakes in the display, pies and cookies. Stiles’ mouth waters at the sights, the smells of the freshly baked bread. His amber eyes are wide and flit here and there, all around the bakery.

 

Behind the counter is a boy who has a few years on Stiles. Stiles can’t tell the age of the boy but he’s never good at that – he looks older but there’s a softness in his face that doesn’t say ‘adult’ to Stiles. Pointed nose, dark hair, eyes that are intensely focused on the task at hand. The task at hand is, apparently, running the front counter. How did he get a job when he’s so young? Stiles wants a job at this bakery. It’s beautiful. Stiles frowns and steps back from the window and looks up at the store-front.

 

 _Hale Family Delicatessen_.

 

It’s then that his mother says goodbye to whoever she was talking to, some woman asking about the bakery and the family from the little Stiles could make out (or pay attention to) and she looks down at him staring longingly into the shop. She laughs, and it’s so sweet that Stiles has to smile back at her.

 

“Are you hungry, kaddishel?” she teases, squeezing his fingers and he smiles bashfully at both the nickname and the question, ducking his head as an embarrassed flush spreads over the back of his neck and tinges the tips of his ears. His mother just giggles and tugs him into the bakery. Stiles doesn’t ask for treats often because he knows how his parents keep a tight grip on the purse strings, saving up every month for his mother’s doctor appointments. Inside, the shop is bustling and crowded, and they wait in line, anxiously on Stiles’s part.

 

The older boy greets them at the counter with a little smile, looking a bit flustered. “Hi, how can I help you?” he asks, obviously trying to push them along but doing it in the nicest way possible.

 

“How old are you?” Stiles blurts out before he can help himself. He does this a lot, and at school he gets into a lot of trouble for it. Before he or his mother can apologize, and before the boy can reply, Stiles’s mouth runs away from him again. “Because are you really old enough to work here? How’d you get a job here when you’re so young? How old do you have to be to work here? Huh, huh? I want to work here when I’m older, I love coming past the bakery-”

 

“I’m fifteen,” he drawls, and Stiles could just huff at that, and he does, but the boy doesn’t offer any other answers to Stiles’s questions so he huffs again. Stiles is nine years old and he does _not_ have temper tantrums anymore, he _doesn’t_.

 

His mother orders him two rugelach with the chocolate drizzle while Stiles pouts about the older boy’s inability to talk. The boys wraps them carefully in parchment paper, slides them slowly into the bag. Stiles loses track of what’s going on, distracted by the cake an older girl is frosting behind the counter. Once his mom hands him the paper bag, Stiles doesn’t think to say thank you or wave to the boy since their interaction is soon pushed out of his mind by other things.

 

It’s not until later when Stiles is alone in his room with the paper bag from the delicatessen finds several pieces of halvah with chocolate on top, which his mother definitely didn’t order nor pay for, that Stiles remembers the boy with the light-colored eyes and the small smile.

 

 _Hale Family Delicatessen_ …

 

~*~

 

‘War’ is whispered on the wind by the time Stiles is eleven, and the next year, Germany invades Poland. He is twelve years old and far too young to know the fear of death.

 

His father, Jonah, is released from the guard in 1940. He gets a job at a newspaper, but without a good source of money, his mother can’t keep up her appointments at the doctor’s. She grows gaunt and weak, going from an outing a day to one outing a week until she’s unable to pin her hair in curls or paint her lips to go out any longer. Stiles sits by her bed after school and reads the Torah to her, reciting the story of Ruth and the story of Yael, and always ( _always)_ the story of Esther, the Jewish queen who saved her people.

 

His mother falls asleep one night, earlier than usual, and Stiles finishes the story of Esther, puts the book down on the bedside table, and curls his fingers in the sheets. He leans down to press his head against the cool sheets and prays to God.

 

He’s twelve, and he knows his mother is dying.

 

That night, Stiles hides his tears when he goes to bed, thinking about the shine that’s gone out of her hair and the glow sapped from her skin and the life that’s slowly bleeding out of her eyes, and he sobs into his pillow.

 

“Just let me have one more day with her,” he pleads with God, wet honey-brown eyes staring out his window and up at the sliver moon in the sky. “One more day. Please, just let her live, let me have my mom, I need her. My dad needs her. Just one more day.”

 

He falls asleep with tear-streaked cheeks and his fingers clutching his siddur, murmuring under his breath, “Please, please, please…”

 

The next morning he finds his father sobbing in the living room and Stiles feels cold inside and out. His mother passed in her sleep, and when Stiles dares to peek into the bedroom, she looks peaceful and she’s still smiling.

 

More than anything, he thinks to himself as he clutches his mother’s necklace during the funeral, more than anything, Stiles wants to hear her laugh one more time.


	2. Chapter 2

1942 proves to be a little more difficult without his mom there for him. He has his first panic attack when he finds himself reading his math book and working out equations instead of doing his book report three hours after he starts. His mother would have kept him on track, but now she’s not there, and his chest gets tight and his vision blurs in the corners then grays out. Coming to with his father standing over him, face twisted with concern, Stiles feels fuzzy but at least the anxiety gripping fast at his heart has fallen away.

Most of the time, he’s good in school because he likes to read and learn and he absorbs things like a sponge, but his grades suffer sometimes because he just can’t focus. His mother always understood and helped him with his homework, but his father is too busy now to keep track of his son.

John Stilinski still works for the newspaper and has been working his ass off to make ends meet. Stiles can’t tell if his father still prays; he wasn’t Jewish, that was his mother - but maybe John’s prayers for his wife hadn’t been answered either. Stiles wouldn’t blame his dad if he stopped believing.

John is on the phone all the time now, talking to people for the newspaper he says. It’s later at night, when Stiles is supposed to be doing homework in his room, that John gets the good calls, the interesting calls. Stiles only hears half the conversation but when John drinks too much vodka and passes out at the kitchen table with his notes splayed out, well, Stiles takes a peek.

He’s careful not to take anything that his dad will miss, but the shorthand notes he can parse through only because he’s asked his dad to teach him shorthand to take better notes in class. And that actually worked. So Stiles settles down in the common room on a couch, turns on the lamp, and reads about Nazi movements, their actions in other countries especially concerning the Jewish people. Poland, from what Stiles can tell, is absolutely fucked.

Ghettos, cramped quarters, forced labor, death camps. Stiles stares at the paper for Treblinka hard. Stiles reads and reads and reads until he’s shaking and then tucks the papers back into the folder his dad had compiled, then he curls himself around the toilet and throws up his dinner.

~*~

None of the notes Stiles read show up in the paper but he can’t help thinking about it every time a uniformed soldier passed him on the street. 

~*~

Nazis aren’t supposed to recruit in Denmark since it’s technically a neutral country and King Christian had dominion, but they break the rules anyway. They always do.

Stiles sees them on the corner, collecting and pointing out the fashionable ladies like the German dogs they are, and the day he sees Matt Daehler from school dons the uniform, Stiles stops feeling safe in Denmark.

There was nothing wrong with Matt before he became a Nazi – he was nice, hung out after school with Stiles’s group of friends. After, though, Stiles watches a middle-aged Jewish man with a long beard and curls get chased down the street by Matt’s unit and he is suddenly happy his mother isn’t here to see what her country has turned into. She isn’t here to see what has become of her people.

Stiles never walks home alone after that.

~*~

In 1943, Jewish-run shops shut down slowly in response to the Nazi crack-downs in Copenhagen. 

He’s sixteen when Nazis appear outside the synagogue and demand lists of the Jewish citizens in town. He and his father meander about town, trying to pretend that they weren’t about to attend the house of worship before they finally make their way back to their tiny home. John Stilinski is panicking, picks up the phone and shoos Stiles out of the room for over an hour. Stiles is chewing his nails, legs jittery, and if the death-mongers weren’t out in the streets looking for kikes to tear down and leave bloodied and humiliated, he’d have gone for a run to get the tension out.

His dad comes in, grim-faced, and sits down.

“Son, we’re going to have to say goodbye to each other soon,” he says, voice reluctant and gritty with emotion.

Stiles feels everything drain out of him. He feels empty.

~*~

He moves into the Reyes’s residence in the middle of the night. His mother had been close friends with Mrs. Reyes while they were growing up. The Reyes had a son around his age, dark haired and intelligent, who died over the summer, so Stiles pretends to be Jacob Reyes to slip under the radar. Their other child, Erica, is blonde-haired and . The only similarity between their appearances are… well, their brown eyes and even then, Erica’s are too round, too dark-red-brown and not amber-honey-brown enough. Stiles has a list to recite (eyelashes, eye-shape, they have moles on their stomachs, their love for chocolate, the same chin from their great-aunt Elisabet) but most of them are just flimsy excuses to prove a familial resemblance that doesn’t exist, and even Stiles knows that. Still, Erica is a powerful ally, a good friend - silently fierce, a quiet force to be reckoned with and Stiles finds this out the first week.

He cuts his hair short and he has to burn his yarmulke, but it’s okay because he doesn’t need to wear it anyway – Stiles knows what’s in his heart. He never takes off his mother’s necklace, but keeps it hidden under layers of clothes.

The Reyes are good to him, very good. Stiles is old enough to have a job but the Reyes are people with money, people whose children are expected to go to school, so he is quickly enrolled alongside Erica. He travels with Erica to classes in the morning, and after the first month, he isn’t so afraid passing groups of green-clad Nazis that collect on the corners.

John Stilinski goes missing the week after, though, so any feeling of ease that settled into Stiles’s bones quickly drains and leaves him feeling empty. He doesn’t know if it’s because of the Nazis or if it was planned; he doesn’t think he’ll ever know.

He’s careful after that, knowing the increasing presence of German forces bodes ill for the children of Israel. He tries not to draw undue attention to himself as Jewish men are practically hunted in the street to make an example of publicly. The storefronts of Copenhagen are no longer – the war has rationed them all down to near nothing. Stiles hasn’t had a sweet since that chance encounter years ago with the older boy and the bakery full of sweets that had made Stiles drool. And that place is gone. Has been since the Nazis started occupying Denmark.

‘Hale Family Delicatessen,’ Stiles repeats to himself at night. He tries to think happy thoughts when it’s dark in the bedroom he shares with Erica, tries to remember his city the way it used to be, tries to remember the way his life used to be. ‘Hale Family Delicatessen.’ The way the first cold of winter nipped at him, the feel of his mother’s hand warm and closed around his, the smell of the bread. The sound of her laugh, her giggle. The rich taste of rugelach. The halvah, a peace offering. The strained smile on the older boy’s face. 

Stiles wraps himself in that memory and feels happy.

~*~

Two months later, things go sour. It’s the Jewish New Year and the soldiers come in rounds trying to find the last of the Jews in Copenhagen, as per request of the fuhrer. Two such soldiers come knocking on the Reyes’s door near the middle of the night and Stiles shakes in his bed. Erica shares the room, hears the soldiers down the hall, and she lurches over to the bed to undo the necklace Stiles hasn’t taken off since his mother died. The clasp jams, and in a fit of panic, Stiles rips it off, clutching it in his hand before stuffing it under his pillow. He turns wide eyes to the soldiers as the door slams open.

They look at him, then Erica, then him again, eyes lingering on his dark hair. “What’s this about?” they demand of Erica’s parents, shoving their batons in Stiles’s direction. “Why does he have dark hair when she is blonde?”

Stiles feels his stomach go cold. It doesn’t matter if his mother’s necklace is hidden; it doesn’t matter if he’s been staying here for months now; it doesn’t matter that he was a Danish citizen, or that Denmark was, officially, neutral. None of that matters, because Stiles doesn’t have blonde hair and he’s going to be taken. They’re going to find out. His ears are ringing, unable to hear what’s being said as the soldiers grow increasingly agitated at the lack of evidence of Stiles’s place among their family.

They start towards him, and Stiles freezes in bed with wide doe-eyes and heart pounding too-quick in the cage of his chest. This is it. He’s going to be taken, and God only knows where he’ll go once he’s in their grasp.

Mrs. Reyes runs to her room and procures a framed baby picture of their son – Peter, captioned as such, the boy Stiles is pretending to be. Peter’s dark hair in the baby picture is what saves him, but the photograph is thrown into the fire dying down in the living room.

The points of the star dig into his palm but he can’t feel that because even Stiles aches for the Reyes family.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was supposed to be posted earlier than now, but... yeah. I have two more chapters written and who knows when I'll get around to posting them. *shrugs* Sorry, I'm a terrible author. If you're feeling loquacious, leave me a comment because that'll encourage me to finish.


End file.
